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In this episode of Marketing Factories, a podcast by Effie Europe and REBORRN, Dafni Prosalika (Partner at REBORRN) welcomes Grainne Wafer, Global Category Director, Guinness at Diageo, recorded at the Gravity Bar in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. Grainne has spent over 25 years at the company and leads Guinness end to end, from the billion-dollar brewery investment in Ireland to the marketing that keeps a 267-year-old brand growing at double digits. Her starting point is disarming: in 2014 a Mintel report told the business that Guinness “simply no longer is cool,” a brand drunk mostly by a narrow, middle-aged audience in a single occasion.
What followed was a root-and-branch review of the whole model, from supply to go-to-market to marketing. Guinness broke its own rules, moving from the “perfect” pint to “beautiful” Guinness, celebrating the rituals rather than the rules around how it “should” be drunk, and opening the brand up to a younger and more female audience through a social-first community model. Grainne walks through how the turnaround actually got built, from the Welcome Back moment born out of lockdown, when the team read its own community on social (people posting white cats on black sofas), to Nitrosurge, the at-home device Diageo created.
The conversation ranges across the questions every marketer is wrestling with: which consumer trends to back and which to let run, why a declining category is never an excuse, the logic behind partnering with the Premier League, the Diageo Way of Brand Building that keeps a global brand consistent while local teams stay free to adapt, and how an idea like Lovely Days can start in one market and scale to the world. As ever, the episode closes with the 58:hours challenge: the one problem Grainne would hand the world’s best minds.